Fall chores

Until a few days ago, October was a very dry month for us. Thankfully some much-needed and very welcome rain is moving in.

While it's delightful to walk outside and sniff the fresh moist ground, we weren't idle during the dry weeks. Among other chores, we focused a lot on firewood, a chief preoccupation for many people this time of year.

Summer before last, we had a neighbor come in with some huge equipment and clear out a lot of dead trees from the wooded side of our property.

He piled the burnable debris in big burn piles and put the salvageable logs in another pile just below our corral.

We've been harvesting firewood off that pile ever since. In the last few weeks, Don's worked hard to cut it all into rounds.

When enough rounds are cut, we load them into a small trailer hitched to the tractor bucket, and bring them up into the driveway to split.

We've been repeating this process for several weeks now.

We're stacking some of the split wood in the barn:

We're stacking some on the side porch:

And we're stacking some on the front porch:

We have room to stack lots more in all three locations, especially since we moved the kindling box from the front porch to the side porch...

...giving us more room on the front porch.

We always keep the hatchet in the kindling box for splitting kindling as needed.

A funny thing happened yesterday while Don was cutting rounds below the corral. He had on headphones and was listening to a recording of some Christmas choral music (he's participating in a performance in a few weeks), and was singing the bass vocals at the top of his lungs. I was in the house so I couldn't hear him -- but suddenly I saw all seven cows gallop madly across the field and disappear behind the barn. Don came in chuckling a few minutes later and told me all seven animals had gathered in a circle around him as he sung, apparently fascinated by the music. "Let's see if they'll do it again," I said as I grabbed the camera.

The animals weren't quite as cooperative the second time round, but they were still pretty funny.

(I think this is known as "singing 'til the cows come home.")

Even our neighbor's cat stopped to listen to the impromptu recital.

At least, until the cows spotted the poor kitty and went barreling over to investigate.

This hearkens back to an earlier blog post about music soothing the savage beast, when I sang to Amy while she was nursing the orphaned calf Anna.

And speaking of Anna, here she is double-dipping off her full sister, Pixie, who's also nursing her own calf Peggy. (Anna is the dark calf, Peggy is the dun calf mostly hidden behind Pixie.)

Despite the crushing loss of Polly earlier in the year, Anna has fended very well for herself, thanks to the generosity of other cows sharing their milk.

We had more rain due yesterday evening, so I decided to clean the chicken coop, a long-overdue task.

The cows watched me with great interest as I dumped the debris into the compost pile.

By the time I finished spreading fresh hay in the coop, it was dusky...

...and the sky was getting thicker as clouds moved in.

It was pleasant to lie in bed last night, listening to the rain on the roof and knowing the chickens had a comfortable cozy coop.

We have one recuperating bird in the coop. A week ago around 9 pm, I heard a commotion outside. I grabbed a flashlight and went out to find a great horned owl standing on the carcass of one of our young hens (from this summer's hatching). I chased off the owl and picked up the bleeding hen, and tucked her inside an inner pen in the coop to either live or die.

By the light of the flashlight, here's some of the blood from the hen...

...as well as some lost feathers.

This little hen, along with some other birds, roosts in an overflow pen adjacent to the coop. The door to this pen isn't solid, so once in a while an owl will swoop in over the top of the door and drag out a chicken. Hooking a sheet over the door each evening works (if the owls can't see the chickens, they don't go in). I just hadn't started hooking the sheets up yet this fall. You can bet I am now.

Anyway, the young hen survived her encounter with the owl, and while she's now on her feet, she's wobbly. She might be fighting a leg fracture, I'm not sure. We'll keep her quiet and isolated in the pen for a couple more weeks and see how she does.

Anyway, that's some of what we've been up to lately as winter approaches.

A very generous cow

Here's our cow Victoria. Notice she's nursing not one, not two, but three calves.

That's one generous cow, that's all I can say.

Smorgasbord !!

We've had it.

Ever since losing our Jersey cow Polly, as you know, we've been using Amy as a nurse cow to feed Polly's orphaned calf Anna. We kept Anna and Amy's calf Trooper in the corral, and twice a day we brought Amy inside to nurse them (the morning nursing was just a matter of releasing the calves from an inside pen).

Well let me tell you, Amy hated acting as a nurse cow. (Notice her eyes slit into malevolent loathing for the task at hand in the above photo.) She would barely tolerate Anna nursing when her own calf was nursing, and often not even then. She was sulky, she was grumpy, she was disgruntled. Singing to her helped a bit, but it sure didn't help when it came time to fetch Amy up from the woods or field and bring her into the corral. No amount of cajoling, no amount of singing, no amount of grain worked to entice her to return to a hated task. Fetching Amy became a two-person job: I would haul on her lead rope, and Don would follow up from behind to whack her on the backside if she balked.

Then Amy developed a simple and effective new strategy: whenever she saw me coming with the lead rope, she would just walk away. Sometimes she would trot away, or run away. In all instances, the operative word was away. Believe me, you cannot catch a cow that doesn't want to be caught.

So we tried confining her to the feedlot, but somehow she managed to escape (don't ask me how). Bottom line, it was sucking up more and more of our time, energy, creativity, and patience to keep using Amy as a nurse cow. There is also the very real chance of making Amy hate our guts, which would be a shame since she's Matilda's calf and has the potential to be a very good milker. The one thing we didn't want to do was utterly ruin Amy's formerly sweet disposition.

So a few days ago we decided Anna was old enough to spring from the corral. She's a canny little lass, and hopefully would be able to sneak drinks of milk from other less-hostile cows.

So one morning after having Amy nurse the calves, we opened the gate to let Amy out -- and just left it open. Trooper followed his mama without a moment's hesitation.

Anna didn't hesitate either, but she sure as heck wasn't gonna follow Amy -- not if she could help it! Instead she paused and started crunching on grasses. (To those concerned the calves' stomachs couldn't handle so much fresh grass after weeks in the corral, no worries; the corral had enough greenery in it they wouldn't have a dietary shock.)

Trooper followed Amy toward the rest of the herd...

...while Anna continued cropping the grass right by the gate.

When Anna finally raised her head, everyone had disappeared.

But soon enough her wanderings brought her into the midst of the other animals. I followed because I wanted to make sure no one picked on the orphan.

At first, Anna and Trooper stayed together.

But soon the other calves came over to greet them...

...and in no time, all the calves were dashing around having fun.

And that's when I left them.

We kept a distant eye on Anna as the day progressed. In the early afternoon, she was curled up next to Trooper amidst the rest of the herd, looking relaxed in the shade of the barn awning. So far so good.

Amy also looked more relaxed and was able to groom her calf Trooper without the little brat interfering.

By the end of that first day, what was significant is what we weren't hearing rather than what we were hearing. Namely, we weren't hearing Anna bellowing. By this we were assuming she was able to sneak enough milk off other (non-hostile) cows to satisfy her little tummy.

As the days went by, I noticed Anna seemed to have an affinity toward Victoria, a motherly older cow with a sweet disposition. Good.

And then we started seeing solid evidence: Anna, always angled in the back and always waiting until a cow's calf was already nursing, busy filling her belly. Told you she was a canny lass.

In fact, she's getting better fed now than she ever was with just Amy. She has a veritable smorgasbord of choices before her! Three fairly tolerant cows (Pixie, her older sister; Victoria; and Sparky) who (mostly) don't mind a little double-dipping.

So despite the crushing loss of Polly, it looks like Anna will grow up nice and healthy. As an added bonus from her weeks in the corral, she's quite friendly toward us, and someday may turn into just as good a milker as her mama.